How to Keep Your Funeral Marketing Relevant in 2018

One of the greatest challenges in funeral marketing today is how to stay relevant to the ever-changing needs of client families.

With more choices and more communication channels, standing out among a sea of funeral homes comes with lots of work.

At the 2018 ICCFA Convention, Kim Butler, the marketing rockstar behind TheURL Dr.com, shared her four recommended channels of funeral marketing, and how to start rocking them today:

1) Content = A two-way conversation

The name of the game today is conversation. Having back and forth conversations with your target market through social mediais one of the easiest ways to create natural engagement. Through this, you not only show that you are an active participant in the well-being of your client families, but that you are fully attentive to their needs.

Funeral marketing tip: By simply asking and answering questions on your favorite marketing channel shows your immediate community that you value their time, and that you are there to help them when they need it.

2) Email = A value provider

Email seems to be the forgotten stepchild of digital communication, but it is still a good way to keep your services in front of your client families, and communicate effectively with them. One way to make sure that your content is relevant is to segment your email list, based on the specific needs and interests of your families.

For instance, all families who have indicated they have an interest in cremation should get a different email than your families who have shown interest in your pet services. This may sound like common sense, but it makes your message so much more relevant to your audience instead of blasting all of your customers with the same message.

The content that you provide through email doesn’t all have to be your own. It can be links from funeral home website, or other relevant items of interest from around the web (cough cough, the funeralOne blog!)… as long as they provide real value to your families.

The major metrics that you want to track include:

The percentage of the time that your emails are opened (open rate)

How often links in your emails get clicked (click through rate)

How fast your email list is growing month-over-month (list growth)

The percentage of the time that your emails never reach their intended destination (bounce rate)

Funeral marketing tip: Want to use email as a way to stay top of mind with families? One easy way to do this is with f1Connect’s 365 days of affirmations. This is a service completely done for you, that puts your email marketing on autopilot. Families will get a different inspiring affirmation in their inbox everyday to help them through their healing process.

3) Reputation = Gain visibility

Pretending that you don’t know what is going on around your funeral home business, and how people are talking about it outside of your small circle of face-to-face contacts is not enough. Tracking mentions of your funeral home and your funeral home’s name and products via Google Alerts is one way to keep your ear to the ground as it relates to rumors, good and bad.

Funeral marketing tip: One way to encourage people to say good things about your funeral business is to encourage them in the form of a link to a review site such as Yelp, within the body of your emails.

4) Mobile = A must

Unfortunately, we don’t get to decide which devices our customers are using to view our marketing channels and funeral home website. With that in mind, responsive layouts that respond based on the size and type of the device is the new standard. Big fonts that are 16 pixels at a minimum, clear navigation that doesn’t call for squinting, short forms, pages that load fast, and keywords that have local intent, are all standards to shoot for.

The same “friendly” concept can be applied to mobile email, where ease of use is a priority. Simple, single columns make for easier reading and testing are all important pieces of the checklist to make sure your content looks good to customers.

Funeral marketing tip: Make sure your funeral home website design is responsive to mobile by checking it yourself. If you need help creating a mobile-friendly website, give us a shout.

How do you keep your funeral home’s marketing relevant?

We’d love to hear from you. How has your funeral home stayed relevant through your funeral marketing efforts? What channels have worked best for you? Tell us in the comments below!

Ps. Want to stay relevant with the kind of funeral home website that your families are looking for? Learn more about how you can make the switch to f1Connect today!

You’re right Rochelle, this is one of the most stable businesses out there, but the only challenge in funeral marketing is how to stay relevant to the ever-changing needs of client families. I think burial at the sea services are more practical and economical than traditional funerals. Providing grief support for the client might sound like a big challenge, especially on discussions on death, but I think it’s more effective than marketing-forward approach.

Rilee Chastain - February 11th, 2019 at 3:19 pm

Hi Paul, why do you feel that this is important? We’d love to hear your opinion!